TRST_Blog

What a lovely surprise! A podcast about my favourite computing device and my design hero! I've looked up to Jon since I was a teenager. He introduced me to my first CMS love (Textpattern by the late Dean Allen). I remember being star struck with his work even before he was commissioned to create identities for Firefox(!!!), Silverback, Mailchimp and Opera. He's even recently worked with DuckDuckGo!

Also, how slick is it to be able to design without being able to fully trust your use of colour? So bad ass.

[Edited 2019-02-09: I forgot to add a link to Jon's portfolio. Oops!]

I got my start building web pages on simple forums. Arguing back and forth about the proper way to do things while the web standards movement was just getting its start. In an odd turn of events, I'm back where I started: making websites.

Given the path I took and the zeal I maintained to follow it, I can—hand over heart—confirm that I wouldn't be literate in HTML and CSS, I couldn't have had the opportunities to earn a living that I do now, if learning HTML, CSS and Javascript was like it feels now: Javascript, HTML and CSS. Now, nearly 20 years later, I have the discipline to learn more abstract programming concepts. But a lot has happened in the intervening years to make that possible.

Maybe, I could have still wound up where I am today if I got my start long after my adolescence. I'm not so sure. What I can't do is sit in my high tower and tell the next generation of kids that the “real” web is all components and higher-order functions… no matter what I'm interested in these days.^[1] Thankfully, everyone can still start where I did—even as a child—and make their own journey. My obligation, as a person who's made it this far, is to ensure there still people willing to help a young developer out getting their start.

Perhaps one of the real casualties of our community is common ground. We all have personal domains, but I haven't frequented a design forum in a dog’s age. Where would you go with an issue today? Right to stack overflow? Reddit? Are there still vibrant design forums? I'm still intimidated by those spaces, so I doubt I would have had the gumption to make a start if YouTube comments, Reddit threads and the like were my only mechanism for seeking help.

Pretty tough interview, for the Akira project I linked to earlier. Generally, I think it was a useful read to gauge the creator's intentions as well as the community's acceptance. The open source world is largely distrustful of Kickstarter and—perhaps—business models writ large. (I know you're cool with it but many are weary.) But that's also why enterprise class applications are either completely sponsored by a company, or it takes 10 years to produce something developers are comfortable tagging one-dot-oh.

Lead developer Alberto Castellani mentioned that development would continue even if funding failed, but might stretch development timelines years into the future before a stable release lands. In open-source, just like everywhere else, you can have software that is: good, cheap, or quickly developed, but not all three. The community seems divided on which two to pick.

I shouldn't be excited for what will probably be a pretty poor performing ARM based *nix laptop, but I am. The newly pre-announced Pinebook Pro will be big step up from the original Pinebook. The Pro version should be powerful enough for light computing tasks and is built from hardier materials. (The plastic on the Pinebook looks horrible.)

Web development isn't particularly taxing—although my creeky Vagrant setup might argue otherwise—and most of my time is spent on the command line. Maybe that's all I need is a decent keyboard and an SSH-capable terminal. I got by with an iPad,^[1] perhaps a $250-ish Laptop could do just as well.

Akira is an open-source UI design software project that's looking for help getting development started on Kickstarter. Consider donating.

I spend every day with design files and while Figma is an incredible achievement, using a browser for complex designs can be difficult. On Windows, you can use the Adobe suite; on the Mac, you have access to Sketch, the Affinity Design suite AND the full Adobe suite. On open source platforms, not so much.

There are programs currently available for open source operating systems, like Gimp, Inkscape, Krita and others on Linux and BSD, but they aren't focused on UI design. Of all the designer/developers who run Linux that I know, they get by either running Photoshop in a VM, or using web based tools. Having a fast, native and modern design tool be accessible to all can only be good for the future of design.

I mean, how many of this last generation of designers got their start using bootlegged Adobe software? Wouldn't it have been better to have gotten our start using applications that were not only free to use but could contribute to its development?

I don't need this. I so don't need this, but my heart yearns. I recently picked up an MFI controller to play a few games and that's been great, but an integrated device would be ideal. The interface has a wonderful aesthetic to it too.

This sounds dumb when you say it out loud, but how this isn't the default behaviour for most distributions I'll never know. It makes the command line feel that little bit more forgiving.

I do the same thing… everyday.

I’m guilty of not taking the care to consider people with different abilities compared to my own. As a person of the Internet, I spend a lot of my free cycles thinking about writing, developing and making things for the Internet. Often, those projects include images which I do my best to include Alt text for anyone using a screenreader to browse what I’ve produced. I feel more guilty for not having thought about the depth that I describe those images.

This old post by Léonie landed in my lap recently and it shook me up:

A good alt text can conjure up wonderfully stimulating mental images. A friendly smile is the same in print, photo or wax crayon.

Whether you listen to an image or see it, the emotional response is the key factor, so why should we recommend that these emotion rich images should be given a null alt text and hidden from screen reader users?

I now think—obviously?—the emotional power and content of images should not be confined to the sighted. If an image is important enough to spend my bandwidth on, to share with everyone who visits my weblog, then I should consider the different means of consumption that someone could choose.

To pull off on a tangent for a moment, I think there’s a wider discussion that should be had about metadata in general. Knee-jerkingly, I consider most metadata to be anywhere from neutral to chaotically evil: used by the powers that be to identify, track, categorize, target, etc. Think of Instagram/Facebook and location metadata, or the invisible fingerprints left after calling someone—all ways to make associations whether helpful or incriminating. Perhaps, I should spend more effort thinking the wide variety of microformats that contribute meaning to the weave of our shared Internet fabric.